This week Jonathan Mandell addressed an issue that has been troubling me for a few years. I have noticed more and more frequently that actors don’t seem to be taking the time to decompress and disassociate themselves from the characters they have been portraying.
Often the actors are in the lobby before the audience is and have formed up in a receiving line. It makes me wonder if the social media age has turned this into an expectation. I can’t say whether it is a chicken or egg problem. Are actors zipping out quickly because they want the recognition or because the audience expects to see them?
Probably the most egregious example I have seen in the last five years was when I attended a piece in a blackbox space. I was seated near the door so I was the first one out of the room. As I exited, one of the actors shot by me clearly still living as the cruel bastard he just finished portraying.
The fact that these emotions were still roiling inside him was a bigger issue than wondering how the heck he got from the stage, out the back of the room and traversed two hallways in the time it took me to take 10 steps. It isn’t really healthy to remain connected with those negative aspects or try to suppress them so you can conduct social interactions for longer than necessary.
Mandell cites NYU professor Erin Mee who is making an effort to include “cooling down” as part of actor training.
She has launched something of a campaign to convince actors, acting teachers, artistic directors, and entire theatres to see cooling down as an integral part of the artistic process. Her campaign is starting small: In the Spring, she will teach a workshop at Tisch on cooling down.
“It is something that is mostly ignored in actor training in the United States,” Mee says. “And I think that’s a problem for actors. It affects their health. It may also affect their acting; if you are afraid you may never be able to get out of character or let go of the character, you may resist getting fully into character. I think we do our actors a disservice if we don’t train them to cool down as much as we train them to warm up.”
I was surprised to read that this sort of training isn’t taught as part of the process. It was something that I was taught when I was an undergraduate so many years ago. I was associated with two productions of the play, Extremities, where the cooling down process for the male actor included a reconciliation process with the woman in the cast.
I was interested to read that there is researching being done to determine if performers experience physical, psychological and emotional harm over the long term.
“The Germans are looking at what actors and dancers actually do, cognitively and physically, to transform themselves when they perform on stage. The next step will be to do some longitudinal studies – stage acting, dancing, and singing over time – to discover how this work alters the brains of performers,” McConachie says. “There’s no doubt that actors’ brains differ in important ways from the brains of accountants, cab drivers, and neurosurgeons, but exactly how and why, no one knows yet. Is this a good thing or psychologically harmful? I suppose it depends on your point of view. I think we can say that most actors do not become serial killers” (notwithstanding “the occasional John Wilkes Booth.”) At the same time, McConachie says, “it’s not hard to imagine that some characters could draw some actors into situations, thoughts, and emotions that could be temporarily dangerous and even harmful to them over the long term.”
This topic bears keeping an eye in the future just to discover how you can live a slightly healthier, sane life as an artist.
Blog title is from the iconic “Cool” from West Side Story. The scene from the movie actually does a great job illustrating the emotions just bubbling under the surface.
One thing that seems apparent in many artistic media is that for many artists the world of their art is separate from an ‘outside’ world populated with other people. This is very true of most studio artists and I imagine it would be in the performing arts every bit as much, if not more.
An aspect of studio practice that may perhaps draw specific types of people to an artist’s life is that the process of making is often done inside its own bubble. You get to absorb yourself into this contracted universe. The outside world disappears and you can escape its pressures and its difficulties, if only momentarily. As such it may be no surprise that many artists are particularly people for whom this distancing most appeals. Many artists I know live for these ‘private’ moments and find their nourishment in the finite constriction of a making process. And when they turn their heads up from the process, back out into the glare and rumble of normal daily traffic, it can be bewildering. Like waking from a dream to find yourself in downtown rush hour traffic….. As a consequence it is hardly a wonder that many many artists are introverts. (Or, conversely, extroverts who thrive in that chaotic glare)
This may also even be the case with performers who can absorb themselves into the world of the play or the music in its carefully circumscribed environment. It is not a solitary experience, but the people surrounding them all belong there and are unified in their shared aim at the same practice or creative objective. For any artist who has just plumbed the depths of their soul, or has alternately cast off the shackles of their own identity, being wakened from that reverie will be a perilous shock.
The experience of artists is too often neglected, even by artists themselves, in part because we see the ‘art’ as something manifest. This is especially true of the audience who has to experience the art as a witness. For visual artists there is an art object at the end of their process, the audience fixates on that, and we invest in what they find interesting. We give birth to new creations and then forget the fact that WE carried such things to term, and all the things that this conception, gestation, and actual labor and delivery meant….. For performing arts the performance is disassociated from the the artists themselves as an ‘event’. The artist serves that noble thing, like carpenters sawing wood for a new house. We pay the price that these created things may live.
An audience only sees this from the outside, the house built and not the sacrifice. For artists it is always more personal, and the art is not so much strictly what gets made by their efforts but the effort itself as an ingredient. An artist’s view is more holistic. Art is an activity for artists more often than merely a product at the end…. We are too casual about the things required of artists to make these things come into being. The perfection of a performance hides innumerable toil and sacrifice that was necessary for it to come out that way. We should not be indifferent to the psychology of artists.
That is my two cents worth.